I run ZenWalk Linux (a modified version of SlackWare) at home. My wife is trying to learn how to use it. I gave her an account as well as passwords to my account and root. I figured that I could fix anything she broke.

What she said she did was to give the nobody account a password and attempted to log in as nobody (she was curious and decided to try it). the login failed and she restarted the system.

She could no longer log into her account or mine, and the root account gave her an error, but did allow her in. When I got home, the entire file system had an owner of "nobody" and a group of "nogroup". It took me about 5 minutes to get all the ownership corrected and to reset the nobody account password back to what it was supposed to be (blank).

I was just wondering if anyone had ever come across this before and why the file ownership changed.